Equipment Street

The digital marketplace that’s changing the way businesses buy and sell commercial equipment

Equipment Street’s vision was to create a digital space where buyers are empowered and sellers can freely compete and win based on the merit of their solution.

Many existing business directories only recommend sellers that pay to get mentioned - creating an unfair and unbalanced marketplace. Equipment Street wanted to eliminate the barriers that buyers and sellers face in today’s highly complex marketplace for commercial equipment. With over 20,000 sellers offering thousands of products, Equipment Street is solely focused on streamlining the procurement process. The website built for Equipment Street allows buyers to create a profile and post a project that specifies the exact type of equipment needed – from desk chairs to copiers and software to telephones. Posted projects are made available to numerous suppliers, each competing to earn the business.

Equipment Street’s vision was to create a digital space where buyers are empowered and sellers can freely compete and win based on the merit of their solution. ThoughtWorks helped them make it a reality.The project that I'm working with ThoughtWorks on is a new site, our web channel, which is called Equipment Street. Which is a marketplace where buyers and sellers are going to meet, and hopefully buy a lot of equipment, and hopefully finance a lot of equipment, which is what we do for a living. This is a start up initiative for us and a huge undertaking because it will change our value proposition to the outside world. What we've been doing is to get a quick piece of functionality, the MVP, the most valuable product, out there for the world to see, rather than waiting six, eight months, or on some projects I've worked with, it could be over a year, before you could take score. After a year of time and expense, it's kind of late. What ThoughtWorks brought to the party was a way to partition the project and get some rapid development out there. Let the community take a look and then we can get some real feedback before you get too deep and too far into it with a lot of money and a lot of expense. It's a good process. First of all, every day at 4:00 PM, whatever I'm doing, we have a team meeting. Typically what we'll talk about is what happened during the day, what's new, what issues, problems. I did a lot of the testing on a daily basis, so as new things are coming, there's a good process where new functionality is posted so I can see it quickly. In addition, because this was very rapid, I spent some time in New York, going and sitting with the team directly. I probably have been with in team maybe four times. And it's really terrific. First of all, it's a great group of people, really smart, energetic, and they really want to do a good job. Which is a good thing. Just going through it with them and giving them the real-time answers, seeing what's happening, I think, led us to hit our project goal. When there was a high and a low, we hit the low target. So, the actual project got done very, very quickly. We went live, believe it or not, in eight weeks. That's exactly right. It is surprising. Because in most larger companies, it would take six months and then the project may not even happen. We actually got it from conception. Meaning when we had the business plan done, approved, and we had the money committed from the day we met. It was really kind of surprising how little time we spent on really detailed requirements. It's more like, let's look at each of these little pieces, figure out what they do, and then build it, rather than waiting so much time on analysis paralysis that you spend a whole lot of money and have nothing. ThoughtWorks was, let's do the hard stuff first. What are the challenges? So when you estimate out all the pieces of functionality, the scary ones, meaning most of the time and most of the effort, we're actually prioritized up front. So, within the first-- really, I think it was really by the 4th week, the biggest, toughest things were already done. The beauty of it is, I don't think we ever got behind. And as we got further and further down, things happened more and more rapidly. Getting the hard stuff done is really, I think, a real important thing. Because as the client, you begin to see how more of those pieces can fit in. Ultimately, we have a much richer application than I thought was possible in phase one. ThoughtWorks has a lot of options. There's offshore. There's onshore. Because we had a very short time frame and with any company, budgets are critical. But the decision was made to use the New York team here, because they're advanced, and it was local. I think that helped because we had a very quick, short time frame to get this thing out and done. By having so many of the bells and whistles, I think in this phase, versus this very, very, what we thought was going to be decent, but not as rich, I think is going to help us get the funding we need to keep going.

Equipment Street provides buyers with the ability to purchase equipment with a cash option or offers a financing solution if required. The process and online space provide a convenient and productive shopping experience, much different than what you would have shopping at a single retailer.

Months can be spent writing detailed requirements and building what you think customers want. ThoughtWorks created a minimum viable product approach and got it into the hands of the users. The rapid feedback and collaborative approach resulted in our new digital marketplace going live in only 8 weeks.

— Ken Sanders, Chief Marketing Officer, Equipment Street

Equipment Street identified a gap in the market and needed a partner experienced at moving quickly. The raw concept was given to ThoughtWorks, and in tandem with business stakeholders, it was translated into usable software. The development team went beyond delivering great code by providing business counsel along the way. As a result, Equipment Street’s online space has buyers and sellers connecting more conveniently and efficiently than ever.